Saturday, April 17, 2010

tremor

I’ve been living in my flat for 17 months now, and I finally met my neighbours last night – and all it took was a minor earth quake.

Well, I didn’t meet my next door neighbour, but I did meet the ones from the two houses opposite (I live at the end of a narrow lane). All three of us came wandering out on the street just before midnight after the block of flats shook for a good few seconds. I had no idea what was going on, thinking that maybe it was a low flying jet for some aerial show (Adelaide has a shitload of car races and festivals and bullshit in these first few months of the year, it’s hard to tell what the fuck is going on most of the time), but the old guy in the flat across from me told me that it was a minor earth quake.

The old guy then introduced himself, and the old guy’s neighbour (some Asian chick) introduced herself to the old guy, and then to me. I’ve forgotten their names already. But you could feel the neighbourly love for a good few moments there.

Yahoo news tells me that a “..3.8-magnitude tremor struck the city's northeast at 11:30pm last night..”. What the fuck is going on? We’re already churning our way through bushfires and floods, and now we’re getting earth quakes?

I’m not sure if this is related, but I moved an outside table a few days ago, and a huntsman spider the size of a baseball glove ran across my hand. I hadn’t seen a decent sized spider since returning from London (and I never saw any insects in the UK, so it had been a good six or seven years), and I literally turned and ran squealing like a new born kitten. I didn’t stop shaking for ten minutes afterwards.